In the prior art, when conducting electronic transactions at retail stores and over computer networks, consumers using prepaid accounts and credit cards have heretofore been required to keep a substantially accurate mental tally of their account and credit balances, so as to ensure that sufficient funds are available at a particular time to conduct a particular electronic transaction. It will be appreciated that the onus has heretofore been on the consumer to maintain this running tally of their remaining credit, or risk facing the sometimes embarrassing and certainly inconvenient prospect that a particular transaction might be denied due to insufficient funds.
Some retail stores and merchants have the ability to perform a balance inquiry on the consumer's behalf, but in such event, the consumer is first required to physically surrender the payment token or account identifier to the merchant. In typical prior art systems of this general type, the merchant is then required to enter a sequence of keys into their point-of-sale (hereinafter, alternately referred to as “POS”) terminal so as to enter a balance-checking mode, before a printed statement of the consumer's account balance can be made available. This prior art process is generally relatively time consuming and requires the direct assistance and intervention of the merchant's POS attendant or cashier as a credit checking intermediary, with the consumer being required to surrender their information related to their personal account and often left feeling embarrassed or disappointed in the event that the account balance is too low to conduct the desired electronic transaction.
That is, in existing transaction processing systems such as Interac, GIVEX, etc., the consumer has little or no ability to obtain a current balance of his or her account before attempting to make a transaction. The consumer may not have sufficient funds, points or credits to complete the transaction, resulting in embarrassment and confusion as to how much is actually available in the account. Similarly, and as alluded to hereinabove, in prior art situations where real-time balances have heretofore been unavailable or substantially inaccessible, the consumer is forced to either lessen the amount of his purchase and try again, or pay using alternate means. In existing systems where balance information is available at the point of sale, the consumer is required to ask the merchant to intervene on his behalf to obtain the personal account balance for him.
In the prior art, methods for authenticating electronic transactions are generally well-known, with some of these methods providing for the presentation of an account balance or credit update after the transaction is completed. Other developments in the field of electronic transactions have enabled consumers to use a transaction token, such as a plastic card bearing a magnetic strip, in more than one context, such as, for example, both as a standard credit card and as a card for performing transactions with a specific vendor. An example of one such system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,865,547 (issued on Mar. 8, 2005 to Brake, Jr. et al. for a “Customer Activated Multi-value (CAM) Card”). Notably, the Brake, Jr. patent does not disclose a system that enables balance or credit checking immediately prior to conducting a transaction. As such, a consumer using the Brake, Jr. card would still be faced with the significant problems outlined hereinabove.
What is needed, therefore, is a system that enables consumers to perform an account balance and/or credit inquiry to ascertain the amount of currency and/or credit that is, at the time of the inquiry, available for conducting electronic transactions. Preferably, the system would allow consumers to ensure that adequate currency and/or credit is available before conducting a particular transaction, without the intermediating assistance or intervention of a POS cashier or merchant.
Also, in transactions involving credit cards, and after receiving an identification token from an appropriate credit card, the POS terminal in the store or place of business has heretofore typically sent an initial transaction request to a merchant acquirer and/or payment processing company (such as, for example, Moneris Solutions, Inc. of Buffalo Grove, Ill., or Payment Technologies, Inc. of Mechanicsburg, Pa.). Thereafter, such payment processing company has typically forwarded the transaction request to the appropriate credit card issuing bank, where the request was to be processed for approval. If the credit card transaction was to be approved, the bank would send confirmation of such approval back to the payment processing company, who would then have returned same to the POS terminal that initiated the original request.
Unfortunately, with these prior art systems, and although there has been no guarantee as to how quickly (or, perhaps more accurately, how slowly) the credit card transaction request and approval confirmation processes might have taken in the past, such processes may generally have taken about five seconds or so. This somewhat time consuming and convoluted transaction request and approval process has, nonetheless, been necessitated in order to ensure that a sufficient credit balance is available at a particular time to conduct a particular electronic transaction. This intricate transaction approval process may be especially necessitated in situations where, as may generally be the case, neither the POS terminal, the store, nor the payment processing company is allowed to store the specific identification token that is received from the credit card.
In view of the foregoing, it may be appreciated that the potentially significant amount of time involved in processing and approving credit card transactions may have been found to be too long and/or to have resulted in long wait times or line-ups, with reduced efficiency and/or profitability to the associated businesses, especially in the cases of businesses involving a high rate of transaction turnover, and/or during peak business hours. What is needed, therefore, and whether in combination with or quite apart from any solutions to the other shortcomings discussed hereinabove that may be associated with the prior art, is a system that enables credit card transactions to be processed more quickly, yet still in a substantially reliable manner so as to ensure an appropriate payment history associated with a particular credit card, preferably without involving the storage of a user's personal credit card information.
It is, therefore, an objection of the invention to overcome, alleviate, and/or mitigate one or more disadvantages associated with the prior art.